Free After James by Michael Helm Page A

loathed in the lab. She pictured herself running, hiding, then what? Shoad would return so she couldn’t go back to the house. She saw herself walking toward the bend in the river he’d spoken of, taking too long to reach it. If it wasn’t there, then she’d know she was right not to go with him. If it was, she’d be in a different kind of trouble. And either way the water here would still be rising. She felt what she would feel, wet, cold, trapped in lowlands. Then she imagined she heard the water coming and the spell broke.
    She would have to be careful of these visions. Alph was drawing them from commercial movies and TV, the junk novels of her teen summers. She’d lost her taste for popular horror long ago as she saw more real horrors, met more people who’d endured them. Yes, that was it, she realized.She didn’t believe Denise’s story because its details, the body twisting out of the fireplace and inside the forge, the serpent in the field, the vision of a chase in the ravine, these were too familiar, too easy to picture on-screen. Real terror was surely much stranger, perfectly strange, not familiar at all.
    Under some compulsion she drew the knife and cut open the string and tore the paper off the paintings. There were four canvases framed in unfinished, unpainted wood. The first was of a dark, swirling chaos with red and orange toward the centre. Two others seemed variations on the first, but with half-obscured tendrils of blue and yellow inside—were these pictures of the power line sparking in the field? In the last painting the darkness was crowded to the edges, outside a rectangle that made for a second frame, as if a window onto a scene. Inside were lines like the tendrils, but dozens, maybe hundreds of them, small, curving, crowded together, failing to contain a disorder of mind. Ali sensed Denise’s need to turn away from the madness of the lines, the spectacle of them, yet her inability to face the endless darkness outside the frame. Written in small red letters at the bottom of the canvas, the word “south,” and below, on the black outside, “north.” Ali understood that she herself was there on the border between the two words but she didn’t know why she thought this or what it meant.
    She looked up. The rain had started again. Shoad turned and saw her. He threw his cigarette into the gravel and started down toward her.

5
    O ne morning on a small harbour ferry heading to Granville Island she’d watched the boat taking its level with False Creek and felt a kind of weightlessness that seemed telling. Anja had asked if they could meet now, today, and as she’d taken the call Ali felt a flutter in her own voice. It would not be good news from the trial, of course, but that wasn’t what the voice and the weightlessness meant. They meant somehow that she was getting less sure of herself and generally less certain, not just to herself but to others, as if she’d become doubted by higher powers, harder to believe in. Her decision not to seek a pregnancy returned now and then in this way, eroding her supposed selfhood, something she thought of anyway only as a cluster of changing biological conditions. But even self-betrayal is betrayal, an ancient constant that never loses its effect.
    They walked along the seawall. Anja’s news was that, switched to the placebo, through growing despair, Subject 11 had written less and less. The slowing made sense but shecouldn’t tell him that his crisis of faith was chemical. Then last week, eighteen days before the trial was to end, he dropped out and disappeared. Anja needed to know that he hadn’t had a seizure, lost his memory or his mind, but he returned no calls or emails. When she went to the apartment he’d listed, she was told by a young landlady that he’d moved out, no forwarding address.
    That morning at the clinic she’d received a small package in the mail, addressed to “Maker,” care of her. It was a box the size of a large basket of